America’s continual affront to justice, economic stability, and equality may have already primed the rise of a new Black Messiah.
In the past, America has worked hard to prevent the rise of a unified Black movement. To prevent this movement from organizing, any and every charismatic Black man or woman was targeted, imprisoned, discredited, deported, or assassinated. This article will discuss exactly how this campaign to prevent Black unity and power evolved, and why America – and the world – is primed for the rise of a new and more powerful Black movement.
Early Wars Against Potential Black Messiahs
Early on, the United States government realized that it could not use blunt force to destroy the ideas of Black self-empowerment. After all, wouldnt that contradict America’s own constitution?
Although the Jamaica-born Garvey might at one time have qualified as a “radical”—Hoover described him as such – he was nonetheless “the most prominent Negro agitator in the world”.
Under his leadership, the UNIA, which to this day remains the largest organization of African Americans ever assembled, grew to a membership of over 3 million souls worldwide. Hoover launched an inquiry into Garvey’s activities in August 1919. This inquiry laid the foundation for what was to become the COINTEL Program – the first preemptive war against the rise of a Black messiah.
When his investigation came up short , Hoover ordered that the investigation not only be continued but intensified. The UNIA was quickly infiltrated by operatives recruited specifically for the purpose, and a number of Black informants were used. Two years later, the best that the Bureau of Investigation could come up with was “mail fraud.” Garvey was then convicted in July 1923 by an all-white jury, incarcerated in the federal maximum-security prison, and deported in 1927. By then, the UNIA had disintegrated, and Hoover had been successful.
After his success with the destruction of the UNIA, Hoover vowed to prevent anyone from ever taking Marcus Garvey’s place as a “Negro Moses.” More than forty years later, he was repeating the same refrain, secretly instructing his COINTELPRO operatives to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify…a well concerted movement” of African-Americans to improve their socioeconomic and political situations.
In 1968, a document obtained via the Freedom of Information Act reveals that Hoover thought that “Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah’,” had he not been murdered. Elijah Muhammad is ultimately dismissed as being too old to fill the bill, King’s nonviolence as too ineffectual. Stokely Carmichael is therefore selected as the most likely candidate, and slated for top-priority neutralization”.
Discredit Them to Destroy Them
Assassinated Libyan leader Momar Gaddafi, whose ideas of a United States of Africa were discredited and likely led to his assassination.
A typical tactic used to defeat a potentially revolutionary movement or to prevent the rise of a Black Messiah is to discredit them.
You might have already been affected by their campaign to discredit leaders and movements. Have you ever heard a Black man or woman clowning conscious revolutionaries, promoting disunity, or saying “We don’t need a Black movement. “We need a spiritual movement”, etc? If so, you may be implicit in campaigns to discredit Black consciousness and Black conscious leaders.
Discrediting ones opponents is a well-known political strategy. Heres how it works:
By discrediting an individual or their reason for fighting, members of the organization begin to view their leader or their reason for fighting in a more negative or irrelevant light. Eventually, the will to fight will be eroded, and faith in the leader will be diminished.
Discrediting a leader, organization, or cause does not come directly from the individual or organization attacking it. For instance, politicians use Super-PAC’s (Political action committees that are legally allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money) for the sole purpose of supporting or opposing political candidates. With a Super-PAC engaged in mud-slinging, dirty politics, and otherwise unethical behavior, a politician may keep his hands clean while discrediting his opponent.
Likewise, politicians or organizations that seek to prevent the rise of a unified Black movement will use the media, other organizations, and other influential individuals to discredit, distract, and destroy.
Real World Examples
By studying the techniques with which the counterinsurgency war against the Party was waged, we can, collectively, begin to devise the ways and means by which to counter them, offsetting and eventually neutralizing their effectiveness.
Here are three real-world examples of each technique used against Black movements and Messiahs:
1. Black Politicians
The ineffective Black Congressional Caucus
To prevent the political empowerment of the Black masses, right-wingers have effectively invaded the politics of black America and owns the Democratic party outright.
The policies of President Barack Obama – supporting the war on Libya, AFRICOM, school closings, privatizations, bank bailouts, prosecuting whistleblowers, shielding banksters, and illegally using drones and missiles to assassinate American citizens – are more right wing than many of the policies passed by his predecessor.
The two party system has become a barrier. We have no other political options between the Democrats and Republicans – and both are filthy.
Barack Obama is not the only Black politician to be held liable for our political disenfranchisement. This article from the Black Agenda Report sums it up best;
The new Black politicans drape themselves in kente cloth every now and then, and they remember King’s birthday and Black History Month. They come together to celebrate and congratulate each other frequently, at occasions like the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual legislative conference. But their politics, black politics haven’t been re-invented. They’ve been compromised. Hijacked. Colonized.
Black politics isn’t about addressing black unemployment, which is at levels not seen in seventy years. It’s not about the catastrophic fall in black family wealth that has resulted from the foreclosure epidemic, also disproportionately concentrated in black neighborhoods.
Black politics isn’t about addressing the issue of black mass incarceration which has shredded our families and futures. Black politics isn’t about stopping the wave of foreign wars which King a generation ago called a demonic suction tube drawing resources away from programs for human needs. There is no room for any of these concerns in today’s black politics.
All that’s left is re-electing the black president, protecting him and the first lady from insults and shoring up the careers of black mayors and congressmen. All that, and getting paid.
Black politics is over, at least until the day when enough of us walk out of the Democratic party to build something new, something that does not yet exist. http://blackagendareport.com/content/corey-booker-and-hard-rights-colonization-black-american-politics
2. W.E.B. DuBois and The NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was actually founded by wealthy Jews and white philanthropists. For over 113 years, the NAACP has tried to control the political and social conversation of the Black population at large.
NAACP Founder Charles Russell
Marcus Garvey was very successful in all of his goals until he aroused jealously from the Negroes in America who wanted to integrate with Whites. Marcus Garvey’s foremost enemy was W.E.B. DuBois of the NAACP – who called Garvey ”…a black gorilla…” and lead the campaign to deport Garvey – called the “Garvey Must Go” campaign.
It is noteworthy to mention that W.E.B. also opposed Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute!!
Today, the NAACP continues to prove detrimental for the Black men and women in America. For instance, on May 19, 2012, the board of the NAACP endorsed marriage equality in a near-unanimous vote by the 64-member body (only two members voted against the resolution).
When asked if the organization is worried about backlash from African-Americans who are “religiously based,” Jealous pushed back on the notion that the movement for marriage equality excludes religious people. “I would like to point out that many of us are religiously based,” said Jealous. “We do this work because of our faith, not in spite of it. With that said, our calling as an organization is to defend the U.S. Constitution. We are here to speak to matters of civil law and matters of civil rights.” – The Root
Ben Jealous has no illusions about his federally funded organization’s mission – to support the United States Constitution and its government above the advancement of colored people.
3. Hijacking the Media
The use of entertainment have been well-known weapons of mass distraction. With the negro mind and body enslaved to carnal pleasures and entertainment, the soul and intellect cannot be stirred to revolution.
How did this
Become this?
You may not personally listen to these cartoon characters, but your children do. These children will grow up with the seeds of ignorance planted within them, and will be ever more disinterested in participating in anything associated with Black Consciousness.
The secret psychological war on Black men and women via the media and hip hop is covered in detail in The Psychological Covert War on Hip Hop
The weapons being used against us have grown ever-more sophisticated, our people are less willing to fight for themselves that ever before, and our conditions continue to disintegrate.
We have reached the beginning of a tipping point, whereby Black men and women the world over will unite into Garvey’s racial hierarchy, or be subject to the presently ascendant system of white power and Black subjugation. We owe it to ourselves to abolish the predators, here and now, or as rapidly as possible, enduring whatever sacrifice we must to achieve the visions of Marcus, Malcolm, Nkrumah, Carmichael, and Newton.
Today, a United Black America, and ultimately a United States of Africa is possible, as is the necessary rise of a Black messiah. But rather than that messiah coming in the form of a single man or woman, if things continue – we may see the rise of an entire nation of them. If leaders of the past were able to change the world on their own, what might a million of them be able to achieve?
Conditions for blacks in America today are worse than when the Black Panther Party was formed in 1966. Blacks in the main continue to live in poverty; disproportionate percentages of blacks die from AIDS and cancer, as the black infant mortality rate continues to be double that of whites.
There is a desperate need for liberation agenda. The Black Panther Party set the example, espousing principles and a history that certainly should be embraced by all those still struggling for freedom. – The Huey P. Newton Foundation
America has worked hard in the past to prevent the rise of a Black messiah. Perhaps if they had worked harder at justice and equality there would be no need to fear the next coming of a Pan-African movement or a Black messiah.
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